Failure distributions of successive dielectric breakdown events

Experimental time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) distributions of standard CMOS hardware are used to demonstrate the problem of detecting a range of successive breakdown events, e.g., from the 5th to the 20th. Specifically, the range and the statistical distribution of successive breakdown events significantly change the shape of the cumulative failure distribution, which is crucial for the low percentile extrapolation. The observed behavior affects the correlation of integrated circuit failure distributions to dielectric breakdown as it is expected that circuit malfunction is caused by a range of successive breakdown events.